Loss, then, was something Nabokov understood all too well. His life’s work was to explore how we grapple with it, and can triumph over it through imagination and art. In his volume of essays, Strong Opinions (1973), Nabokov disdained the loss of material wealth after his escape from Russia. He had smuggled out his real treasures, he insisted: his memory, his language and literary heritage, and his artistic gift. (He might have added too, that most enviable gift: a natural, cheery optimism.)

America suited Nabokov. Here, he made yet another new start: as a lepidopterist at Harvard, as a lecturer, and as a writer in English. By the time of his death in 1977, his reputation stood like a colossus over twentieth-century literature. As well as his masterwork, Lolita (1955), Nabokov’s output was awesome – in English, Russian, and their translations, which appeared in the 1960s. To name one favourite work is to start a cascade from the bookshelf: Pale Fire (1962), The Gift (1938), Pnin (1957), and Mary (1926), his first novel, in which so many of the later dominant themes are announced.

The building of this empire of the imagination is the subject of a new collection of essays, Stalking Nabokov, by Brian Boyd, author of an acclaimed two-volume Life of the novelist (1990–91). A biography often leaves offcuts that turn up later, knocked together by the author into a ‘job lot’ collection of essays. Stalking Nabokov is not such a misshapen piece of furniture. Boyd has gathered twenty-six essays and lectures examining different aspects of the novelist’s life and work for the insights they give to his art. Three pieces gathered under ‘Nabokov’s Butterflies’ are a reminder that he was a serious lepidopterist as well as a novelist, still highly regarded today for his contribution to the field. The author of Lolita spent most of the 1940s bent over a microscope at Harvard. Boyd also shows how Nabokov brought a scientist’s sharp eye to his art. ‘I prefer the specific detail to the generalisation,’ he quotes, ‘images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit to the synthetic jam.’

Further essays investigate Nabokov’s ideas on metaphysics, psychology, storytelling, and other writers. Boyd has great fun exploring him as a psychological novelist in the context of recent advances in neuroscience and the theory of mind. These explorations are genuinely thought-provoking, especially in view of Nabokov’s assertion that ‘all novelists of any worth are psychological novelists’. There is no interrogation by Boyd, however, of Nabokov’s frequent, notorious criticism of Freudianism, dismissed by the latter as hollow and intellectually vacuous. There was certainly a simplistic vogue for psychoanalysis in mid-twentieth-century America as a sort of ‘cure- all’, a penicillin for the mind. (Ingrid Bergman’s Dr Petersen in Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound typified the public’s idea of a psychiatrist at that time.) This does not explain, however, Nabokov’s often shrill denunciation of psychotherapy (a form of treatment for which there is now clear, clinical evidence of effectiveness). In condemning generalisation, Nabokov sometimes resorted to generalisation himself.

Boyd also reminds us what a superb teacher Vladimir Nabokov was – and thankfully remains, with the publication of several volumes of his lectures on literature. Nabokov’s injunctions to his students to resist conventional interpretations and to pay close attention to detail bring to mind his careful taxonomic eye, as well as his view that ‘in a work of art there is a kind of merging between the two things, between the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science’.

It is the essays on Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada (1969), and other works, though, that are the main delight of this volume. Boyd’s deft analysis of the novels is superb. ‘Every mature Nabokov novel is a demanding but exhilarating workout’ for the reader, he states. In these essays, Boyd is an ideal personal trainer for this workout, encouraging us to read Nabokov’s prose as meticulously as it was written, and demonstrating how it is more than worth the effort. In ‘Nabokov as Writer’, for example, he provides a surgical, almost word-by-word analysis of the openings of Nabokov’s first novel, Mary (1926), and Transparent Things (1972), which is, indeed, genuinely exhilarating.

Nabokov’s final, unfinished work, The Original of Laura, consisted of 138 index cards containing just 9000 words. Some were scribbled in the author’s final, painful days in hospital, in 1977. ‘Destroy it,’ he told his family. ‘Destroy it,’ was Brian Boyd’s reaction on first reading the cards ten years later. Nevertheless, in 2010, The Original of Laura was published in a facsimile edition, with a somewhat defensive introduction by the author’s son, Dmitri. In the final essay of Stalking Nabokov, Boyd explains in detail the seven reasons why he was disappointed with this work, then sets out to show why he changed his mind on each one. Boyd altered his view so radically, in fact, that he now considers the work contains writing by Nabokov ‘at the height of his powers’.

This was not the judgement of most reviewers, including John Banville and Martin Amis, who remarked, ‘When a writer starts to come off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident.’ Amis is surely correct that, from Ada onward, Nabokov’s genius began to implode, like a giant star falling in on itself. By all indications, The Original of Laura, even if completed, would still have been as sterile and hermetic as its predecessor, Look at the Harlequins! (1974). ‘I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions,’ Nabokov once insisted. The strong impression one gets from his final works is that, towards the end, he was writing for his own amusement and for fewer and fewer dedicated fans. Increasingly, Nabokov shut out the uncommon as well as the common reader as his prose collapsed into a repetitive, obsessive, self-referential verbal black hole. Boyd’s reasoned, manful defence of The Original of Laura does not convince. However, engaging with his arguments even when one disagrees – especially when one disagrees – is always a worthwhile and pleasurable ‘workout’.

Brian Boyd is not only Nabokov’s biographer but also his pre-eminent critic. This is a valuable and delightful collection of essays on one of the twentieth century’s most significant novelists.

CONTENTS: SEPTEMBER 2012